When a client device requests a website's page from a webserver, the webserver initiates a web session. Using the web session, the webserver is able to track interactions between the client device and the collection of webpages that form the website. This session information includes information provided by the user of the client device through a number of different webpages that form the website. For example, for a retail website, the session information can include the contents of the electronic shopping cart, billing addresses, payment methods, shipping addresses and contact information.
Because of the large number of visitors to retail websites, server memories are not large enough to maintain session information indefinitely. As a result, session information must be deleted from the server after a period of time. In addition, stored session information represents a security risk for users. For example, if a user walks away from a client device after entering information on a website, a new user may access the client device and retrieve the entered information simply by revisiting the pages of the website that contain the entered information. To avoid this security risk, some webservers terminate web sessions after some period of inactivity from the client device and delete all of the information entered during the terminated web session.
Although this strategy improves security for the user, the disappearance of all the information the user previously entered is annoying to the user and degrades the performance of the webserver. In particular, since the entered information is removed when the session expires, the webserver must serve additional pages to again receive and store the lost information. This requires more processor time and thus degrades the overall performance of the server.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter. The claimed subject matter is not limited to implementations that solve any or all disadvantages noted in the background.